ARTICLES ABOUT COP KILLER BY DATE - PAGE 4

Ronald Alvine, whose death sentence for the 1992 murder of a West Chicago police officer was voided by Gov. George Ryan's mass commutations in 2003, was ordered Thursday to spend the rest of his natural life in prison. DuPage County Circuit Judge Robert Anderson, who presided over years of legal proceedings involving Alvine, issued what he called the "only appropriate sentence, that of natural life." Alvine was awaiting resentencing when the former governor acted to clear Death Row, so his sentence technically was not commuted to life at that time.

A drug dealer that has been selling an extremely potent batch of narcotics as heroin still may be in business and responsible for new overdose cases treated Tuesday, police believe. Investigators are working undercover around the Dearborn Homes public housing complex on the Near South Side attempting to catch a dealer that has been calling the drugs "lethal injection" and "drop dead" because of their extreme potency, law enforcement sources said. Police believe they are close to identifying the dealer, a source said.

A man convicted of the 1992 murder of a West Chicago police officer has been found mentally fit to be resentenced for that crime. Ronald Alvine, 42, twice before had a death sentence overturned on appeals for the murder of Officer Michael Browning. Prosecutors were working to have him sentenced to death a third time when then-Gov. George Ryan commuted the sentences for all Death Row prisoners in 2003. DuPage County Circuit Judge Robert Anderson, who ruled Alvine unfit in August 2002, accepted the state evaluation Tuesday and ordered that Alvine be held in the County Jail until a resentencing hearing can be held.

When I first became a newspaperman (nothing so lofty as "journalist") 40 years ago next month, it was at the end of an era when papers carried more stories about people than about government, a few reporters still carried guns and many toted pocket-size half-pints of whiskey. The human condition and its frailties, frequently manifested in violence, were the stuff of an expected good read, and cop reporters' names such as Joe Morang, Ed Rooney, Walter Spirko and the inimitable John Danovich were as significant to readers as George Will supposedly is today.

Convicted cop killer Aloysius Oliver avoided the death penalty, but a judge Friday sentenced him to life in prison with no chance of parole. "The sad truth is that whatever's done here today will not bring him back," Cook County Circuit Judge John Moran said, referring to slain Chicago police Officer Eric D. Lee, 37. "If it could, the decision would be an easy one." Oliver, 28, was convicted in January of first-degree murder for shooting Lee twice in the head after the plainclothes officer ran up with two partners to stop Oliver from beating a transient in the alley behind his Englewood home.

A 10-day hunt for the suspected killer of a police officer ended Saturday in bloodshed before horrified tourists in central Rome, where the fugitive grabbed a French woman at gunpoint before he was mortally wounded in a shootout with police, officers said. "What does it matter, I'm already dead, I'll kill her," Luciano Liboni yelled as police demanded he surrender, according to Carabinieri police. The woman was unharmed. Liboni, suspected of killing a police officer July 22, was spotted Saturday morning and surrounded near the Circus Maximus, an ancient Roman field.

Saying James Scott was not coerced into pleading guilty in the 1999 slaying of a Chicago police officer, Cook County Judge Clayton Crane denied Scott's motion to withdraw the plea. "I've had the ability to observe James Scott," Crane said. "James Scott is a very intelligent young man. Nobody tells James Scott what to do. When he acts, it is in his own best interest." Scott, 28, in recent hearings has argued that his plea was not voluntary, that his public defenders coerced him into making it. He accepted the plea agreement in January, two days after a jury found him guilty of the 1999 murder of Officer John Knight and attempted murder of his partner, James Butler.

Cook County Judge John Moran on Tuesday denied defense requests for a new trial for convicted cop killer Aloysius Oliver. Oliver, 27, was convicted in January for the August 2001 shooting death of Chicago tactical unit officer Eric D. Lee. His attorneys argued he suffered "irreparable prejudice" in the case because of Moran's rulings to keep out evidence that could have benefited Oliver and because of prosecutors' failure to turn over evidence...

Two of James Scott's former attorneys on Tuesday testified that they did nothing to manipulate or force Scott into a plea arrangement that saw him sentenced to life in prison in the 1999 slaying of a Chicago police officer. Scott, 28, has been attempting to withdraw from the plea deal by saying that it was not voluntary and that he was coerced into accepting it by his former lawyers. Assistant Public Defenders Mark Levitt and Michael Mayfield both testified that they never badgered Scott into taking the deal, which allowed him to avoid a death sentence after a jury had convicted him of killing Officer John Knight.

James Scott testified Monday that his former lawyers badgered and coerced him into accepting a plea arrangement in January that allowed him to avoid a death sentence in the slaying of Chicago Police Officer John Knight. "I had already lost, and so I felt like I was in a no-win situation," Scott testified in a hearing before Judge Clayton Crane, who is deciding whether to allow Scott to withdraw from the plea. "I just gave up." As part of the deal worked out within a day after a jury found him guilty of murdering the officer, Scott admitted that he knew Knight was a police officer when he shot him in 1999 after a traffic chase.